


What Time Can Do

by WorryinglyInnocent



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: A Monthly Rumbelling, Beauty - Freeform, Canon Compliant, F/M, Introspection, s7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 02:23:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20667758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: At the Edge of Realms, Rumpelstiltskin takes a moment to reflect on his lifetime with Belle.Written for the @a-monthly-rumbelling prompt:Shouldn’t I Be Less In Love With You?(song)





	What Time Can Do

Rumpel tucks in the blanket around Belle’s shoulders as she dozes on the sofa. She’s been dropping off like this a lot more in recent weeks, and Rumpel can’t help feeling that this is the beginning of the end. He doesn’t want to think about what might happen when that end does come. They’re still no nearer to finding the Guardian, and after living this wonderful lifetime with Belle, he can’t bear the thought of going back to a life without her, a life that, for the moment, seems doomed to be interminable. 

It won’t be the same as before. This time he will never be truly alone. He’ll have Gideon, a constant reminder of his and Belle’s love, a piece of her that will always live on in her son. Rumpel doesn’t want to think about how close they came to losing Gideon as well. Since their happy beginning, they’ve managed to put all that behind them, and it is only recently, dwelling on his impending loss, that he’s been thinking about the ones he’s suffered in the past as well. 

A small voice in the very back of his mind, a dark, snide voice that has been silent for so long in the face of such overwhelming love, reminds him that everyone always leaves him in the end. No-one ever stays around forever. 

Rumpel just shakes his head at the voice. For the last sixty years, he and Belle have always been side by side. She doesn’t want to leave him, not like everyone else who left. It’s just soon going to be her time to go. Too soon, Rumpel thinks, because an entire eternity with Belle will never be enough for him.

Rumpel looks at the photographs that line the mantelpiece, the snapshots of their life together and all their travels. Whilst he always enjoys seeing Gideon grow up from the baby they lost and found to the adult they first met, he doesn’t like seeing Belle age whilst he remains static. 

All the same, he does find it wonderous to realise that no matter what happens and no matter how Belle may change physically, her love remains constant. 

Rumpel is so used to everyone leaving, to there being a limit on love. Belle herself left more than once, having reached that limit. It didn’t occur to him that there was no time limit. They’ve gone through their lives together and for sixty years, their feelings have never wavered. They’ve never got bored with each other; they’ve never run out of things to talk about. Even when Belle began to lament her wrinkles and grey hairs, Rumpel never stopped thinking of her as the most beautiful woman in this or any other realm. There has never been a moment when Rumpel has felt any regret at their lives together.

It’s a testament really, to what time can do. Time decays and makes things crumble and rot. It has made Belle’s bones brittle and her skin delicate and paper thin, her eyes and ears weak. 

But time also makes things stronger, like the thousands of years that turn carbon to diamond and render it indestructible. Time has made his and Belle’s love into something that cannot be altered. Its foundations had been shaky to start with, but time and patience and work have hardened them into something so solid, not even death will shake them. 

After he thought that he had lost Belle the first time, after she walked out of the Dark Castle dungeons and out of his life, seemingly forever, Rumpel had known even then that there would never be another for him. The seeds of that immutable, ineffable love had already been sown, and over the last sixty years they have grown and blossomed into a tree that cannot be felled. 

He glances over at Belle under her blanket. She feels the cold more now, even though here on the edge of realms it has never been anything other than a warm spring evening. 

Her eyes flicker open, as if she can feel him watching her, and she gives him a little smile.

“What are you doing over there, Rumpel? Reminiscing again?”

“Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Nothing at all.” There’s a long pause, and even with her eyesight going, Rumpel can tell that she’s reading him like a book. “Tell me what you’re thinking about. You’re wearing your lost in thought expression, and I don’t think that it’s just from thinking about the past.”

“It’s easier to think about the past than the future, sometimes.”

Belle flaps one hand free of her blanket and beckons him over to her. Rumpel takes her hand, settling himself on the floor beside the sofa.

“It’s going to be ok, Rumpel. I promise.”

They haven’t talked much about the inevitability of what is going to happen soon. Rumpel has always hoped that if they don’t mention it, it will go away, as futile as he knows that approach to be. His avoidance tactics have brought him nothing but trouble in the past, and they will not make the future any easier to bear when it comes. Still, Belle humours him, and what is to come remains unspoken between them, except for the little moments like this where she seeks to reassure him. 

She squeezes his hand, and the subject is closed again. 

“So, tell me what you were thinking about.”

“You.”

Belle rolls her eyes. “You always say that.”

“That’s because it’s always true.”

Her eyes are still so bright and blue, the one part of her face that has never changed as the years have passed. 

“Did you ever think that we’d get this far?” he asks. “When you first came with me, back in your father’s castle in the Marchlands.”

“I promised you forever, Rumpel. I keep my promises.”

Except, this is one she can’t keep, because she cannot live forever even if he can. He pushes that thought to the back of his mind. 

“There were some stumbling blocks at first,” she says. “But they’re all so long ago now that they feel like another life, something that happened to someone else. Back when we were young and foolish.”

“I was hardly young when we met,” Rumpel points out. “And I don’t think I’ve ever stopped being foolish.”

“Perhaps not. But I think I love you for it nonetheless.”

They fall back into silence for a while, and Rumpel comes back to his previous train of thought. 

“Did you ever think that we would get this far?” he asks again. “After we were married, I mean.”

Actually, no, that isn’t the best frame of reference for such a question, as it was just after they were married that everything began to fall apart around them, a quagmire of denial and the desperate hiding of the truth. “After we got Gideon back,” he amends. “When we properly began this life. Did you think we’d get this far?”

Belle smiles. “Why ever wouldn’t we, Rumpel?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we would have got bored.”

“I could never be bored during a life with you. Every day is an adventure, even the ones that we just spend here in this cottage. Do you get bored here with me, Rumpel? I would hate to think that you found me dull.”

There’s a teasing note in her voice, and he knows that her pout, still the same little pout, is just for show.

“Oh Belle, my love, you could never bore me.”

“Then what makes you think that I would feel any other way about you?” She squeezes his hand, her grip still tight and strong even as the arthritis slowly takes her fine motor function. “What we have is true love. It’s seen its ups and downs, especially in the first years, but surviving those is all part of love’s nature. Love doesn’t fade or slip away.”

Rumpel would like to agree with her, but he knows from experience that it does. He had loved Milah, way back when, and she had loved him, and look how that had ended, with hatred and bitterness on both sides. 

Belle can tell from his silence that he isn’t convinced by her words, and she continues. 

“All right then. Love doesn’t fade or slip away when you love someone enough to want to keep that love alive, to want to work on it. Our love is so strong now because of all the struggles we’ve been through, Rumpel. The life we’ve built together has weathered all manner of storms, but that’s because we put the work in.”

Rumpel untangles his fingers from Belle’s and presses a kiss to her palm.

“Belle, my love, I don’t think that there will ever come a day when I don’t find you utterly remarkable.”

“In that case, I shall make sure I don’t disappoint.”

They both laugh, and Rumpel thinks again of the many things that time can do. 

They have both changed irrevocably in the last sixty years; maybe his own changes are not written on his skin as Belle’s are, but visibly or not, he is not the same person who left Storybrooke all those decades ago to take his family to see the worlds. 

But there are some things that time cannot change, and the fundamental truth of his love for Belle, and hers for him, is one of those things. 

Despite the conclusion to their story that is coming ever closer, it feels right, their love, their life right now. Rumpel has lived for so long, and he has seen so much love in all its forms, sometimes true, sometimes not, sometimes fleeting, sometimes strong and stoic, but it will never compare to the love he and Belle share, and nor should it. 

Belle closes her eyes and snuggles back down into her blanket with a happy little squeak of a yawn, and Rumpel leans in to press a kiss to her lips, his sleeping beauty. 

They may be running out of time, but he would not change this time for the world.


End file.
